Updating...some older paper

I have started to update my previous paper analyzing patenting activities and determinants of national innovation systems in the transitional Eastern European space. Well, as always..the good the bad and the ugly features and issues are there. After all it is not like writing the whole paper again...but it takes a lot of time (too much) as well. So...I keep my fingers crossed

Forced Break from my Research

This week I cannot work almost anything since I have to attend and pass the course in Monetary Policy by Mr. Eichenbaum from NorthWestern, which is a funny/smart/etc teachers...but there is a problem: these huge macro models especially monetary ones are not my thing. at all. so, hopefully it will not be too painful.

Eviews 6 - Small is Beautiful

When I first ran anything on Eviews this Autumn I was quite skeptic about its true power. But when you think about it, this program knows an amazing amount of stuff for its size. And now with version 6 it gets even better (than Stata? - in some issues yes).

Not so small after its latest makeover it features some amazing new things, some of which are not available in Stata not even via the ssc channel.
See for yourself.

The things that got me jabbering was panel cointegration tests: of Pedroni (1999) up till now was the RATS's turf or Kao (2000) requiring Matlab or Gauss platforms.

Seems I was right about Stata10

Unfortunately, it looks like indeed Stata10 has some serious bugs. The thing that I hate the most is running a do file with multiple specs regressions and get an error in the middle of the program because one of the variables has magically dissapeared. Sometimes is a transformation var only which can be re-done manually from the command line, but when the base variable is gone...not much one can do but clear and reload the data. Perhaps a 9.2 downgrade is not that bad after all.
Other people had the same problems.

It takes a Genius to Read (some) blogs

At least, it seems so. More details here.

Adding control variables

The stock of domestic R&D is a hard to get and valuable variable in the case of developing nations. On top of that I have to collect some data, measures of human capital…of which I opted for the world wide known Barro and Lee 2000 dataset and perhaps some other schooling stuff from UIS Unesco and the WID 20007.
I already used the BL 2000 and the tertiary enrollment and they seem to impact significantly the TFP spillovers, which is good. :)

Finishing the business

YES, I am extremely happy to say that I have finished the FDI spillovers…sometime Sunday night before the meeting with my advisors. It wasn’t a must after all but the numbers proved to be significant despite their inherent deficiencies. However, I have to look closer at some countries that are not represented anymore in my FDI restricted sample…but again, how much and who is investing in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan? So far I don’t know but it’s on my wish list to cross-check it with the UNCTAD data.